On April 1, 1970 the members of the Liberation Brigade of the Budapest Hosiery Factory waited nervously in the Hungarian parliament. They were in the building for the first time in their lives in order to receive the State Prize “in recognition of the performance their socialist brigade.”²

“It wasn't long after my divorce that we received the award, and the whole thing was still inside me, and when I went up the stairs of the National Assembly I couldn't stop crying,” remembered the leader of the brigade. She had only been called to the factory director's office a week earlier to learn that her brigade would received the award.³ Mrs. K. and Mrs. T. had gone to the hairdressers on March 31, but they didn't laugh any more than usual; on the same day there was an enormous storm. They became upset that they would have to accept their award with soaked hair, but their hairdresser calmed them by placing nylon hats on their heads.⁴ The day on which they received their award, April 4, was the day of the commemoration of Hungary's “liberation” twenty-five years earlier. At the reception in parliament they were able to see people personally who were only known to them from television and newspapers. The most remarkable part of their experience was not seeing the celebrities, but tables that were full of caviar and citrus fruits, and a waiter who served them red wine with white gloves. They did not have the courage to eat these luxury foods offered; the director of the factory even had to encourage Mrs P. to ask for a second glass of wine.⁵

The celebrations did not end with their visit to parliament; they were seated in the front row of the April 4^th celebrations in their own factory, and received a special mention in the opening speech. The newspapers followed them for weeks and asked how they live their everyday lives. The articles that were written about them, however, focused on their socialist brigade in order to show how they had formed a “socialist community.”⁶

Their colleagues and the local doctor congratulated them, while telegrams arrived in droves.⁷ It was probably the only time in the lives of these nine women when they felt that everyone who lived in the socialist state was equal and enjoyed the same possibilities. They had worked for years as semiskilled workers in the moulding workshop of the Budapest Hosiery Factory. This workshop had the lowest prestige of any area of the factory because of the amount of steam in the air, the fumes, and the unbearable heat that persisted through winter and summer alike. At the time they received the award they were middle-aged women. All had arrived in Budapest at the ages of sixteen or seventeen from small villages and agricultural communities in the poorest parts of the country after Second World War. Their migration to the city was motivated not merely by their need to survive; they were also driven by the desire for adventure, for freedom, and for other things.

Even with their lack of skills the women immediately found work in the city, assisted by relatives or natives of their home villages who lived in Budapest. Many of them took employment as domestic servants, and then at the first available opportunity went to work in the capital city's factories during the 1950s. Some of them married before entering factory employment, some immediately afterwards, mostly to skilled workers. In this period of their lives the greatest struggle was not in finding a satisfactory husband, but in getting an appropriate job. They worked for several decades, often together with their skilled-worker husbands, in the Budapest Hosiery Factory, founded in 1951.⁸

By the end of the 1950s the majority had already given birth to their first children. Although according to the propaganda of the time they belonged to privileged groups in that they were both workers and women, in reality many of them never received a flat from the state, and if they did not want to live as room renters, or in unheated and damp flats, then they had to solve their accommodation problems themselves. During the turmoil of 1956 many of them squatted in empty flats.

State intervention in their lives was experienced most strongly in the workplace: they had to participate in labor competition, they were compelled to form a socialist brigade, and, in order to advance their positions at work, it helped for them to join the party, or for their husbands to join the workers' guard.⁹

Because of their unhealthy working conditions, as middle-aged women they suffered more from illness and premature aging than their direct superiors, who did not perform manual work. By the time they received their award, some were either divorced or widowed. The eldest of those who received the State Prize retired soon afterwards.

According to official discourse the socialist brigade was a collective organized according to political norms by members of one united social group; in their case the industrial working class. Despite this assumption of unity, when members of the brigade shared their life-stories and specific events that had been important to them, they would emphasize different experiences just as much as they would emphasize the common experiences of their fellow brigade members. Only ignoring the particularity of their individual life-histories they could construct a common history; instead they emphasized differences in their life experiences, and thus also constructed individual identities.¹⁰

Personal identity is a social construction that shifts depending on the stage of the life-cycle.¹¹

When relating a life-history a subject constructs her identity with reference to different groups at different times. The narrative of life reveals the groups that possessed considerable symbolic importance at different stages during her life-cycle.¹² Both her personal and group identities shift over time, and life-cycle interviews can therefore be difficult to balance.¹³ In my own interviews the only stable categories are male and female sexual identities.¹⁴ The identities of interviewers at different times vary as much as that of the interviewees. They not only identify with their decorated colleagues in the brigade, the workshop “collective,” or the now-bankrupt factory, but with their home or the Trabant car they bought with their prize money that came with the award. By linking the structure of their life stories and the ways they describe the groups with which they have identified, one can reconstruct the mentalities of women workers in postwar Hungary.

The Role of Consumer Goods in Constructing Identities: the “Working-Class Car Owner”

Consumer goods played a central role in the construction of identities during the socialist era.¹⁵

They appeared in the official discourse of both party and state as guarantors of a higher standard of living. In contemporary propaganda this representation is linked to the year 1959, when the seventh congress of the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party launched a new living standards policy.¹⁶ Equally, the apparent opposition of the “socialist man” and “petty-bourgeois mentalities” was an important theme in official discourse. This contrast was emphasized by considerable debate in the press, in which commentators used normative categories to ask how “socialist men and women” should regard certain symbolic possessions, like the car, the weekend house, the plot of land, the sewing machine, or the fridge.¹⁷

In the life history interviews with the women of the Budapest Hosiery Factory different goods and artefacts played symbolic roles. There were some for whom a plot of land in the Buda Hills was important, for others it was factory-manufactured kitchen furniture or a rural house which served the needs of several generations of the same family. Here I want to examine in some detail the role that a Trabant car played in the identity construction of one of my interviewees. Mrs. T, at the time she bought the Trabant in 1970, worked as a quality control officer. After the death of her husband in 1968 she continued to look after her twenty-four and twenty-year-old sons. In the interviews she openly described herself as someone who fought for the interests of the workers. She often drew attention to the fact that in order to settle shop-floor conflict she would sometimes go straight to the director of the factory. At this time she tied her hair into a bun with a hair clip, which was regarded as fashionable in the workshop. She could often be seen in photographs of the brigade's social events playing a central role, either singing or dancing in the center of the photograph.

In 1971 a report about Mrs. T. and her new car appeared in the factory newspaper, illustrated with a photograph.¹⁸

The aim of the article was to present to its readers a successful working-class woman who was the first worker in the factory who could buy a car. The journalist represented her as “a friendly smiling lady” who was “a member of a notable collective” which had “transformed her into an outstanding woman worker.” According to the article she was not only successful because of her membership in a decorated socialist brigade, but also because over many years she had been a leader of the workshop party cell and a union shop steward. The article drew particular attention to the fact that it was a subject of everyday conversation in the factory that “we have one working woman, who comes to work in her Trabant every day.” It concluded by asking Mrs T. what the three most important things in her life were. She replied: “My work, my family, and my car.” The article, by implication, represented Mrs T. as a woman who by the standards of the period could be considered emancipated. Of the workers in the factory she was one of the first to own a car, and she was proud that in her family she was the only one who drove, for she would not allow her grown sons behind the steering wheel. Her suggestion that her work was more important to her than her family was probably deliberate, in opposition to then dominant notions of gender relations. This was perhaps because she was a widow and her sons were grown and largely independent, but it was also because for her the factory was a space in which she could define her life, a stage on which she could be successful. Ownership of a Trabant made it possible for her to represent herself as a strong, self-confident working woman, who was able to come to work by car every day, despite the fact that in her community it was men who overwhelmingly bought cars.¹⁹

It was not coincidental that Mrs. T's car became the object of “male pranks” in the factory.²⁰

Practical jokes formed one of the ways in which male workers in the factory bonded. Whoever successfully planned and carried out a joke was regarded as stronger for doing so by his colleagues, and the most successful achieved a high position in the informal hierarchy of respect that grew between them. It was the exception, rather than the rule, that such a joke would be made at the expense of a woman. When a woman became the object of a “man's joke,” the woman involved usually became accepted into the group of otherwise male workers. For this reason Mrs. T. was seen as suitable as the potential victim of a male practical joke: “One day I went out into the yard and the Trabant was nowhere to be seen, it had vanished. I asked the gatekeeper where my car had gone, I came in with it in the morning, and parked it. He replied that he didn't know, as he hadn't seen it. I asked Attila, one of the electricians, whether he had seen it. He hadn't seen it either. Then I went into the dining hall, and there was the car, they had taken it inside. I became very angry, because there was barely enough space to drive the Trabant out. It later became clear, and by that time I was laughing, that the electricians had taken the car, and brought it inside.”²¹

Why did Mrs. T's colleagues and friends regard her as such a successful woman? The reason was that she was able to get a car which many others desired without joining the long waiting lists. She used the moral and material recognition that the State Prize brought her, as a member of a decorated socialist brigade, to buy the Trabant. She wrote to the Minister of Light Industry, arguing that a decorated worker should not have to wait five years for her car as was common at the beginning of the 1970s, but that she should be able to get it as soon as possible from the garage.

In her interview with the journalist in 1970 Mrs. T. stressed two elements of her life. First, she represented herself as a successful, decorated woman who had been able to buy a car in a shorter time than many others. Second, she argued that she needed the car, as the daughter of a sick, elderly father, so that she could go often to her home town of Túrkevé to visit her parents. “I didn't even dream of winning a State Prize. I was delighted with the large amount of money, because I knew I could buy a car with it.²²

I wrote a letter to the Light Industry Minister to ask her to help me get the car early,²³ and I had the permit within three weeks. The whole thing only took two months; I passed my driving test, and now I often visit my sick father.”²⁴

In her interview Mrs. T. stressed her initiative and determination: it was her idea to write a letter so that she could get the car more quickly. Furthermore she revealed what had been left out of the newspaper article at the time. The car arrived more quickly than she expected so that she could not pay for it all instantly. An upcoming family wedding provided the solution: “The Trabant arrived so quickly that I didn't have the last 10,000 Forints for it. At that time the father of my son's fiancée loaned me the money. I paid him back, I worked day and night, I worked as a cleaner.”²⁵

Getting the Trabant required exceptional effort; paying back the loan even forced her to take on a job regarded as beneath the dignity of an “hourly-paid worker.” In a difficult situation she used the connections provided by her extended family to be among the first manual workers in the factory to park her own car in the factory yard.

Among the stories told in connection with Mrs. T's Trabant are those which show how useful the ownership of a car was in daily life. With it she took her son to his allotment; she was able to make weekend excursions; she could visit her relatives in the country; she gave lifts to fellow brigade members so they could visit relatives; and every year she gave lifts to Soviet soldiers from their Óbuda barracks to the factory's celebrations of the October Revolution. She also drew attention to the fact that this allowed her to buy petrol at the rate of two Forints a liter from the Soviet troops, a rate which was “very cheap.” I asked her how she had come to this arrangement, and whether she had bought the petrol from the same soldiers whom she had taken to the factory celebrations or from others. She told me that she bought it both from those she had given lifts to and others, whom she had come to know while studying Russian. She arranged for the soldiers to bring the petrol to the caretaker of her apartment block, and he paid them from the money that Mrs. T. left him. This worked so well that when the caretaker decided to buy his own car, he bought his petrol in exactly the same way.²⁶

Local Soviet troops also appeared during my interviews with other brigade members, largely in stories about buying items like bedclothes and color televisions at preferential prices.

Mrs. T. remained very attached to her first Trabant. She drove it 150,000 kilometers and even when she sold it, she paid close attention to what happened to the car. For this reason she chose a buyer who also worked in the factory. Even today she regrets that its new owner did not care for the car as much as she did. After buying it he took the car to Italy, where it was involved in a traffic accident and completely written off. In the life-history interviews of other brigade members such continuing interest in a car that had been sold was a recurring theme.²⁷

As a consumer good the Trabant acquired a symbolic meaning in Mrs. T's life cycle, for she bought three more in the following years. She was always able to gain enough money from selling her old car to be able to afford a new one. When she sold the last of her cars, just as with the first, she did not trust its future to chance. She sold it to her grandson, and it remained well cared for within the family. At the time of the interview, in 1999, this Trabant was still in good working order.

For her the Trabant symbolizes the period in her life when she was fully fit, successful in her workplace, and an independent, self-sufficient woman. Her personal identity was closely tied to ownership of the vehicle: it both enabled her to identify with other drivers, and allowed her to take on roles that were defined as masculine. While the original Trabant no longer exists, she feels that some of the money invested in it was worthwhile, for the third Trabant is still riding up and down the country's roads.

“We've heard that we can occupy a flat:” Local Identities in Óbuda and Békásmegyer

Immediately after arriving in Budapest, the majority of my interviewees had settled in the suburb of Óbuda because of its plentiful employment opportunities. Óbuda, in the northwest of the city, maintained a quasi-rural character until the 1960s.²⁸

Perhaps because they felt at home there the migrant girls from rural areas quickly settled in this district. The construction of highrises in Óbuda and the loss of its “rural” character was paralleled by similar transformations in other working-class districts of the Hungarian capital. It was part of a “fifteen-year housing development plan” from the mid-1960s which allowed workers in Óbuda and Békásmegyer to leave slum-like small houses for healthy flats. But local collective memory has represented the process as a barbaric attack which killed the romance of the district with its small pubs, tiny workshops, and its hustle and bustle.²⁹

Some of my interviewees placed greater importance on their place of residence than did others. The different stories they told involving their homes contained several common themes. One such recurring theme was the impact of the centralized system of flat distribution under socialism, and how one received a flat through this system.³⁰

Another common topic in my interviews were stereotypical opinions about high-rise housing estates. They did not feel particularly uncomfortable living in such surroundings, but this environment transformed their relations with immediate neighbors. This is illustrated by the story of two sisters, who live in the largest of the highrise housing estates in Békásmegyer. The elder sister, Mrs. S., lives in a flat of fifty square meters on the fourth floor of a ten-floor block together with her daughter, her son-in-law, and two grandchildren. Her younger sister, Mrs. F., lives only five minutes away in a family house with a garden together with her daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren. Mrs. S. likes to stress that she can see her younger sister out of her front window, and they meet nearly every day. When she first came to Budapest at the end of the 1950s, Mrs. F. lived with her older sister, who already had a family. When she married, Mrs. F. first got a home of her own; her husband obtained a spacious house with a garden through the enterprise he worked for, the Óbuda brick factory. She has lived there ever since. Irén (Mrs. F.) did not forget the importance of the extended family, for when her youngest brother moved to Budapest from the southeastern Hungarian village where the family had originated, he lived with Mrs. F. Her brother so liked the neighborhood that he married a girl from the same street and moved to his own house two doors down.

Mrs. S's path to her flat in Békásmegyer was more circuitous. As the eldest child of the family she was the first to move to Budapest. Initially she took work in the Óbuda Shipyards as an unskilled worker, and her colleagues helped her to find a room to rent. After marriage to a male colleague, they lived with his parents. Even though they submitted their request for a flat to the local council immediately after their marriage in August 1955, they only received one during the 1956 Revolution. During the months of the revolution, like some of my other interviewees, they simply squatted in a flat that was still being built near the factory: “We heard that we could just occupy an empty flat, because everybody was doing it. We went with my inlaws and we just took the flat. We occupied a ground-floor flat and there was already a tile stove, but they hadn't yet fitted the toilet, and there was no glass in the windows. We sorted out the windows in the factory, but the doors only came later. We didn't have any coal, and we couldn't heat it. Then we saw that people were carrying something around in sacks. We asked about it and discovered that they were coming from the Fuel Selling Enterprise site, next to the petrol station, and they were carrying coal. We went too. We stored the coal in the common toilet. Even though we had requested a flat, we still had to pay a 600 Forint fine. That was a lot of money in those days, a month's pay. We had to move to a one-room flat in exactly the same block.”³¹

Mrs. S and her husband's recourse to squatting was a direct consequence of the operation of the socialist housing distribution system. They saw that there were others living in their neighborhood who had been waiting for years for their own flat. As they were a family with small children, they saw it as legitimate in the unusual situation created by the revolution to not wait to be given a flat by the state but to simply take the opportunity to acquire one for their family. Three members of the brigade squatted in flats in 1956 in the same area. In their interviews they sought to justify their actions by saying that others did exactly the same thing at that time, and that they had submitted an official application for a flat. Mrs. S. still expressed fear since after the 1956 Revolution she and her husband had to pay a fine and had to move to another, smaller flat. Mrs. S. believed that she had been right to occupy the flat.

Those who squatted in unfinished flats in 1956 made them habitable by mobilizing extended family and workplace networks. Mrs. S. and her husband fitted a lock that symbolized their occupation of the flat together, her husband connected the electricity and the gas with other families, while the windows and doors were made in the factory. They also stored their fuel together. A sense of common identity developed among those who squatted in 1956, since all of them got their homes in the same way. Numerous stories illustrated the intense neighborly relationships that developed; everyone knew who in the block had a lover. There were, however, some who reported their neighbors to the local council for fitting televisions to earn supplementary income. For others the friendships that developed derived from both living together and working in the same factory or workshop.

At around the time that Mrs. S. squatted, another of her younger sisters, Teréz, moved to Budapest and married Mr. S's younger brother. At first neither of them had their own home, they lived with her parents-in-law, and they all eventually moved to the rural town of Pilisvörösvár. Mrs. S. felt sorry for her sister because she had to commute to work and therefore suggested that the two families live together. They believed that if the two families applied together, they would improve their chances of getting a larger flat. This plan succeeded: the two families were able to move to “a beautiful, big flat” that was near both the factory and the market. The period of her life seen by Mrs. S. as ideal was brought to an end by the state's high-rise construction in Óbuda, because their block was scheduled for demolition to make way for the new flats. The authorities made several offers of replacements to the residents of the block. Some of their colleagues chose to accept an offer of financial compensation from the state, which they then used to build private houses in a village next to Budapest, while continuing to work in the factory. This early manifestation of suburbanization combined industrial wage labor with a strong link to a rural environment.

In this interview Mrs. S. described how she made a choice among the newly constructed flats offered to her. She participated in the socialist housing market as a consumer who viewed her flat as her own private property. She would use her own money to buy her new flat, because it was now possible to purchase a flat from the state. She did not accept offers of flats in other working-class suburbs of the capital like Újpest and Pesterzsébet. She deployed two constructions of identity to justify her decision. First, her husband was an “Óbuda native,” and had grown up there. Second, if she moved far from the factory where she had worked for years, she would have to change her job, something she did not want to do under any circumstances. In the meantime her daughter had married, and she now decided that she would apply for a flat together with the newly married couple.

Mrs. S. was grateful to the factory lawyer for helping her solve her accommodation problem, for his advice enabled her both to get a flat with her daughter and to stay in Óbuda. “We went to work, my husband was already the caretaker in the factory, and the lawyer was really nice. He asked my husband ‘Józsi, what's wrong?' I saw that he raised his head. And then he replied, that, just imagine, they don't want to give us a flat that the kids can live in. He then said ‘and what's the problem?' He replied ‘I want to live with them.' Then he asked ‘you don't want to give them the title (to the flat)?' He replied ‘why not?' And then he wrote a letter in which we gave up the title of the flat to our daughter, but that she wouldn't sell it without our consent.³²

We took it to the council offices. There was a horrible, incredibly arrogant man there we had to deal with, I think it is possible to say that of him. He demanded to know who had advised us. I turned round to him and said ‘though I've only completed elementary school I'm not a complete fool. Why can't I give my flat to my daughter, if that's what I want? You have no right to tell me what to do.' He didn't dare say a word after that. So the flat is in my daughter's name . . . . I could choose. The fourth, sixth, or the ninth floor. I said to my husband, let's take the fourth, because even if I'm drunk I can get up there.”³³

The acquisition of the flat in Békásmegyer can be read as a story of Mrs. S's personal success, in that she was able to convince the local housing official with a small legal maneuver. Yet in her interviews she never considered the flat a status symbol. Official discourse propagated in vain the idea that the new high-rises were places of health, space, and comfort. Mrs. S. remembered the years in her previous, decidedly old-fashioned flat as the happiest period of her life. She would often list the problems that she faced as a resident in a new high-rise housing estate: she moved into the middle of a construction site in 1980, hers being the only block in the whole street that was complete. She was far from the shops and the suburban railway station: “We had to walk through so much mud. We could only go out in red, yellow, and green boots. Everyone on the estates went around in them . . . . We walked out in boots with our shoes in a bag; we only changed when we got on the train.”³⁴

When Mrs. S and her sister, Mrs. F., spoke about the high-rises, they spent most of their time complaining. Irén (Mrs. F.) had a degree of distance from them, as she lived in a family house, albeit one in the direct neighborhood of the blocks of flats. The sisters' favorite way of describing their relationship is through referring to the fact that they can see each other from their windows. In their stories critical of the high-rises they use a strain of local popular discourse which developed in direct opposition to official discourse and which expresses nostalgia for the world of bungalows that had characterized Óbuda until the mid-1960s. They viewed moving into new flats as a necessary but poor replacement.

Prior to moving into the high-rises many residents had lived in homogeneous neighborhoods with their workplace colleagues. The social privatization encouraged by the new flats made for very different social relations. In Mrs. S's stories newer residents of the flats appear as intruders. She sees them as evidence that the prestige of the area in which she lives is declining. In everyday life this means that she feels she has to be scared. She told many stories about “strange people” beating up the car park attendant, breaking into the flats; one break-in happened in the block during one of my visits. Yet her relationship to her home is not simply negative, somewhere she lives involuntarily. She said different things when I asked her about the high-rise estate in general, as to when she described her life there. She knows many people that live on the estate, and when we walked round it together, we would frequently stop to gossip with acquaintances. She has a key to her neighbor's flat. She and other residents take part in organized programs for local pensioners on the estate; balls and quizzes. Irén enthusiastically tells stories about the fancy-dress balls. Although Mrs. S. and her family could have sold their flat after privatization and bought a house in a village just outside the city, this was a step they did not take. Instead they built their lives around them in Békásmegyer where they were able to maintain close family ties, not only because Mrs. S. continued to live with her daughter's family after the death of her husband but also because of her proximity to her younger sister. She sees Irén every day and they participate together in social activities. In contrast to many of the stereotypes it seems possible to say that moving into high-rises did not destroy neighborly relations; these ties and kinship networks remained strong, especially where the new residents came from similar social groups.

“They called me movie-star”: Was “Working-Class Woman” a Specific Identity?

Female equality and unequivocal support for women going to work were central pillars of official discourse during the socialist era. Although the propaganda of the regime maintained that there was no unemployment, fluctuations of supply and demand in fact determined how many unskilled women worked in industry and what work they could get. In 1965 an article in Nők Lapja, the most popular women's weekly, described how unskilled women workers were laid-off in one factory. The article expressed sympathy for women affected, but did not dispute the “economic justification” for the lay-offs, and supported the official point of view. The author even suggested that those laid off had to go because they were unreliable and often absent—in short, not good workers. The director of the factory who was quoted by the journalist made no reference to official claims of gender equality, but instead articulated the primacy of men in the world of work. In deciding who should be laid off the director indicated the family status of the worker and, where a married couple worked in the factory, he sacked the woman rather than the man, because her wage was almost always the lowest. He regarded it as acceptable that a woman should earn less than a man for the same work, and explained that when a woman lost her job, she did not lose everything. She could go back to the family, which was how she defined her life. In fact, most women who were let go did not stay at home; according to the article most found jobs in the market-gardening unit of the local state farm.³⁵

In the official discourse of the socialist period the rhetorical promotion of gender equality and the integration of women into socialist labor appeared together with notions that stressed how female wage labor came second to the role of women within the family. The need to guarantee an adequate supply of female labor was regarded as an important function of the state. State control over labor was not only symbolized by the institution of workbooks, but also by the fact that official discourse represented working in the same factory and workshop over many years as a virtue in itself. The “core” of the long-term workforce received material rewards, and labor mobility was condemned.³⁶

The state attempted to strengthen the ties of the worker to the factory, through, among other methods, the publication of articles in both enterprise and national newspapers that dealt directly with factories and their histories. This was a consequence of an attempt to build collective identities among workers in factories through official propaganda.³⁷

The notion of being part of the “core” of the workforce appeared in several of my interviews. Perhaps because official discourse had stressed the connection between worker and workplace, a secure industrial job was held up as an ideal. Articles appeared frequently in the Hosiery Factory's newspaper about workers who had been there for decades. They paid special attention to the existence of “factory dynasties”: where not only a husband, wife, and children worked in the factory, but also brothers and sister-in-laws as well.³⁸

As a result, strong factory-based identities seem to have been adopted by my interviewees. Even today many regard it as a virtue that they remained loyal to their factory. One foreman described his feeling of being at home there by saying “we were all friends, we celebrated our name days together.” Many viewed the privatization and then the closure of the factory as a personal tragedy, including those who had already gone to work elsewhere. Admittedly, this uniform picture partly stems from my choice of subjects. I only interviewed workers who worked in the factory over several decades and who gained state awards for their work in the plant. I never interviewed those who spent only several months or even a year there and who were consequently stigmatized in official discourse as “wandering birds.”

In the life-histories of my interviewees there was never any opposition between work and family. All of them came from families where female labor outside the home was seen as entirely normal.³⁹

Their mothers and grandmothers had worked outside the home on the family smallholding, sewed for a living, cleaned houses in the towns, took in washing, or were employed as domestic servants. When I challenged them during the interviews, asking if they would rather have stayed home, many considered the question incomprehensible. Yet their definition of “work” was not restricted to industrial labor under the three-shift system at piece-work rates. In their life-histories it appears as a kind of work ethic; they attempted throughout their life to maximize what they could gain from their physical labor. Indeed in the interviews it became clear that they now no longer regard themselves as full members of society, because they cannot work. “I worked already at home. I was taught to work . . . . I can't stand it without work. Even now I ask whether they need someone in the day care center or the laundry; I've always said if they need someone, I'll go for four hours, or even for eight. I'm sick from the fact that I can't work. They sent me from the factory in the end as well.”⁴⁰ Yet from Mrs. T's life-history it appears that her homemaking took as much strength as work in the factory. On another occasion she told a story of how her husband vainly attempted to persuade her that as he had moved high up the hierarchy of the factory she could give up work and they could live as an ideal bourgeois family in which the woman brought up the children and ran the household. According to her account Mrs. T. would simply not hear of staying at home. She persuaded her husband that her goal in life was not to run the household, but to work in the labor market: “The children were born, they had grown up a bit, and they needed winter coats. I told my husband that I would only go out to work until I could pay for four winter coats. Then I told my husband I would work until they stopped growing. And I went on from there. I can't stand being without work.”⁴¹ In the interview her husband appears as a powerful figure, whom she had to convince of the importance of her going out to work; this was not so difficult since he recognized that with two of them employed they could guarantee a higher standard of living for their family. For Mrs. T. the factory was not merely a workplace, it became a space of self-realization.

Another of my interviewees, Mrs. T.J., explained that it was not just for a job that she left her village next to the River Tisza for Budapest. What attracted her was the prospect of independence that living in the big city offered.⁴²

She described her married life as a struggle on two fronts: the first at work, the second in the family. Mrs. T.J. often proudly tells stories as to how well she was able to look after men: she could wash, iron, and cook well for them. She did not just do this for her husband and her sons, but for her younger brother when he arrived in the capital, and for her lodger. She also spoke in detail about work in the workshop. She does not just refer to the labor process, but she represents her workplace as somewhere where she could joke with her colleagues. For her both the factory and the family were spaces in which she could prove her capacity for work. She repeatedly mentioned that when, after her heart attack, she was on sick-pay and had to deliver her proof of sickness, she could not visit the workshop without seeing and spending time with her colleagues.

As far as Mrs. T.J. was concerned work did not end with the factory shift. This was not just because she saw it as her task alone to do the housework and bring up the children, with the occasional help of her husband, but because she sought earn as much as possible from her labor power. My interview partners often told stories about how they took on additional work outside the factory to improve their family's standard of living. This tended to happen during the points in their lives that were most difficult financially, especially when after childbirth they temporarily left the labor market. In one such period Mrs. T.J. became a wet nurse and took on the role of caretaker: “For me it was always work, work, so that I could earn. I was often so tired when my sons were small, and I took them around with one in the push-chair, one on top of the push-chair, the third in my tummy and my hands froze, because I didn't have anything for gloves, didn't have anything for anything.”⁴³

For others, like Mrs. T., the owner of the Trabant, the workplace was a space where they could define themselves as actors outside the family. They readily represented themselves as defenders of others, as working women who could stick up for themselves and their colleagues against the bosses. In 1973 the factory banned unskilled workers from working overtime, justifying this with reference to a ministerial directive. The factory newspaper argued that this measure protected the workers' interests, since they would spend less time in an unhealthy workplace. In fact the underlying purpose was economic; overtime was not needed. In the interview the women workers described this measure in different ways. Éva (Mrs. T.) argued that it was only then she could really fight for the interests of her colleagues, because she regarded the abolition of overtime as utterly unfair: “They then said we couldn't do overtime on Saturdays. I just said that my partner works for the television, and if this doesn't change, then one of his colleagues will come round to dinner over the next week, I'll tell him about it, and they'll make a program about this. A week or so later they asked me whether I'd said anything to the people at the television. I said I had. They replied that I shouldn't have said anything because I'll be able to do overtime.”⁴⁴

In this story Mrs. T. emerges as the successful defender of her rights. She could use a relationship not available to others in the workplace, and which really conferred power and prestige in the period. She had friends at the television company who could use their influence to address the complaints of women workers; her “friend at the television” was an assistant in the film factory. Yet what Mrs. T. and her coworkers experienced as unfair, the newspaper reported as a measure to defend their health.

Although my interviewees described differently their workplace and the everyday strategies they employed there, their accounts contained similar themes as well as collective stories. The process of finding their jobs initially, comparable to negotiating an obstacle course, is an example of this. Many were only able to secure factory jobs through the use of personal connections.

While their husbands proudly described themselves as “skilled worker” or “shift machine supervisor,” my female interview partners hardly ever called themselves “women workers,” except when referring to the fact that they had won the State Prize. Some of them even today refer proudly to the fact,⁴⁵

even though they now find it strange that they won an award that most commonly went to actors. When speaking about the prize they use the kinds of phrases that the propagandist press used at the time. Why, one might ask, were they reluctant to describe themselves as “women workers?”

The answer, it seems, is because belonging to a category of women workers has played less of a role in shaping their personal identities, than their social links with and loyalty to the factory, or the award they won together, which they experience today as both a form of recognition and a stigma.⁴⁶

Over the course of their lives working as a “working woman” meant nothing more than a means of clinging to urban life. In 1968 and 1969 the magazine Nők Lapja ran a series of articles which debated whether being a “working woman” was a “mark of status.” In the first article the journalist admitted that she “wrote the phrase only with difficulty.”⁴⁷ From the numerous contributions to the debate it became clear that by the late 1960s many young women were unwilling to enter factories, desiring instead cleaner and more comfortable office work.⁴⁸ Readers of the magazine were presented with the full range of popular stereotypes of factory work. A year later, my interviewees received the State Prize as manual workers, and as a socialist brigade.

Today the work identity of the former brigade members has been eclipsed by other group identities, those that tie them to other consumers, the factory, or the home. The former head of the brigade has worked in a theatre now for around twenty years. Today she more readily talks about the actors and performances; in her glass cabinet there is a dedicated and autographed photograph of one actor. Of course the brigade is not uniform in this regard: Mrs. T.J. still has her medal displayed on the top of her cupboard. Mrs. T. has kept the diary of the brigade in order that her grandchildren can read about how they once lived.

In contrast, for the oldest member of the brigade, Mrs. E., it is the cinema that now plays a central role in her self-identification. She enthusiastically compares her husband, when describing their period courting, to the contemporary film star Pál Jávor: according to her account he sent her flowers and serenaded her to gypsy music.⁴⁹

In her own life she is most proud of the fact that as a young woman she was regarded as so attractive that she was nicknamed “movie star.” “I am very proud that my brother's friends and the projectionist in the cinema called me movie star. I was so pretty and I loved the cinema so much.”⁵⁰ The fact that these women spent most of their lives as industrial workers is not especially pronounced in the identities they hold today, despite the fact that the socialist regime awarded them the State Prize as exemplars of working women.